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15 Mile (24 km) Track

Almost everything outside the window of John Morris’s helicopter is his or will be his soon. When the semiretired internet entrepreneur bought the original Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch in 2004, here in the desert town of Pahrump, Nev., it was a 2.2-mile racetrack with a couple of spectator tents and porta-potties. The gate to the place wasn’t much more than a swiveling lead pipe.

“I thought it’d be fun to own a racetrack,” says Morris, 69, angling his red, black, and white Robinson R44 helicopter toward a large parcel of desert scrub that he says he’ll soon lease from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Last year, Morris paid an undisclosed sum for a 150-acre chunk on the track’s west side; once he has the bureau’s piece, the Spring Mountain Motor Resort & Country Club—his ever-growing automobile playland—will total 900 acres, with the world’s longest track as its centerpiece.

Currently, the longest track is Germany’s Nürburgring, the legendary 13.1-mile circuit in Nürburg, near the Belgian border, which includes sections of public road and isn’t open for racing most of the year. When he’s finished, Morris will have at least 15 miles of private track just 45 minutes from the Las Vegas Strip. He claims that Pahrump, population 36,441, is the “fastest-growing town in the U.S. for its size” (a January tourism office press release only commits to Pahrump being “a sleepy desert town on the rise”) and that the property was a great deal. He paid $5 million for it, including 3 acres that front Route 160, the main road from Las Vegas to Death Valley, which annually handles an average of 1.7 million tourists.

There is a Chris Harris video where he drives a vintage Mercedes at Nurburgring in some series or other. He has to do a "pace" lap behind a safety car, and it takes 40 plus minutes. I never thought of that before I saw the clip.